Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a Chinese Marxist philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary leader who founded the People's Republic of China. He developed Maoism — an adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to agrarian society — and wrote extensively on guerrilla warfare, contradiction, and practice.

Mao's philosophical essays On Contradiction and On Practice drew on Marxist dialectics to address the particular conditions of semi-colonial China. His legacy is deeply contested: the revolutionary who united China and his catastrophic social engineering campaigns are inseparable threads of twentieth-century history.